Having been involved with this kind of thing in the past, so let me make some commentary. As was pointed out - most of your answers are actually determined by the business, and shouldn't be done via a technical solution.
> 1. It's got to be cheap. It's not that cheap up front. A customer will do stuff at 3am, and then screw it up needing physical access "right away" because they punched in the wrong IP address into their firewall and it don't have a OOB connection, or you can't hook up a simple crash cart (KVM on a cart) to it. So you (or your employee) is running around then, or you'll need to invest in higher-end/remote management gear. Oh, and they'll agree to any cost at that moment (3hr minimum @ $150/hr?) but refuse to pay since it only took 10min to fix, or simply can't afford it. Note that you don't really see/feel this problem until you've got 50+ customers and you've invested in your infrastructure and haven't paid it off yet. It's easy to ignore the "once in a blue moon" times when you've got only a few customers. > 2. it's got to be low-calorie on my part. Then do pre-pay rather than post-pay. Ie: People pay you $100 and put that into their "account", then you debit that "account" with ongoing costs as they happen. When the balance is $0, turn it off automatically. No money, no service. Also gets around the issue of people paying 1/2 their bill - remember you're aiming for the cheapest customers possible. Be sure to check on the govt rules for holding money in an account on someone's behalf - it might be different than holding a generic deposit for billed services. > 3. there has to be good isolation. This is standard business stuff - I'm assuming that you already do a VPS service from your website, so how do you handle a 75mbps burst to a virtual server on a 100mb cable that has normally ~50mbps usage? Employ the same attitude. > 3.5 (electrical Qs) You will not get a NEMA5-15 Receptacle (the standard one) 7.5a fuse for a few reasons: - Probably somewhere breaks the electrical code - Your non-standard 7.5a breaker will cost 5x the 15a breaker (if you can even find it) - You're not going to be around when the circuit pops and needs to be _manually_ reset. Remotely resettable ones cost stupid amounts of money. So my advice is suck up the upfront cost and install a remotely manageable PDU (eg: www.servertech.com), and bill the customer based on actual usage (watts!). Running 230v/400v/600v is great, but people assume 120v and bring gear for that (eg: wall warts for a 5 port dlink switch). Servers aren't as much of a problem. People have _no_ idea how much power their gear uses. I've had people come with 15 disk san arrays assuming it's the same as their 1U server at 150w. I've also had the inverse too (told modem draws 1 amp @ 230v). Hope that helps you out. Cheers, Ross. -- _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
